How Ronnie Wood survived Jeff Beck, Rod Stewart and the Rolling Stones
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As a member of the Jeff Beck Group, the Faces and the Rolling Stones, Ronnie Wood is one of rock’s great survivors. In 2007, the guitarist walked Classic Rock through his rollercoaster life and career – and his sometimes bruising relationship with Keith Richards.
Ronnie Wood pushes a long, bony-fingered hand through his spiky, dyed black hair, lights yet another cigarette and tells me about the kicking Keith Richards just gave him. It happened on stage with the Rolling Stones in Boise, Idaho, he says, “about five gigs ago”. By the time they got to the next stop on the tour, in Atlantic City, “I couldn’t walk, and I had to have all these steroid injections.”
But why? What had Wood done to incur the wrath of the man more usually known for describing his fellow Stones guitarist as “my little brother”? Ronnie pulls a face, blows more Marlboro smoke my way.
“He doesn’t like it that I’m sober now,” he says, somewhat bashfully, as though knowing he’s done wrong. “I’m glad we’re off tour now. The music was just getting better and better, but being on stage in my new sober way it was very difficult. Keith wanted his old sparring partner back, and he was making it really hard for me. Then he kicked me on stage and… oh God! It was bleeding inside the muscle. I didn’t realise like, until I couldn’t walk.”
Not that the two have fallen out, you understand. After all, as Keith told Ronnie after the show: “It was a friendly kick. He said: ‘Apparently you backed into my foot.’ Then gave me a hug and said sorry.”
So that’s all right then.
“Yeah, I suppose,” he says, flashing that ear-to-ear grin. “Until the next time, anyway…”
That’s the thing about Ronnie Wood: you just know there will always be a next time. A renowned survivor – not just of several spells in rehab (as he admits, his latest attempt at sobriety is the culmination of “10 years of trying”) – but also of some of the biggest and best groups in the history of rock, from The Jeff Beck Group to the Stones, via a string of hit albums with Rod Stewart and The Faces (which, despite appearances, are not actually the same thing). He has also played and/or recorded with a veritable Who’s Who of star names, from BB King and Bob Dylan to Eric Clapton, David Bowie, Guns N’ Roses and many (many) others.
Does he have a favourite? He does, actually: the bloke he calls “my mate”, pointing to a magazine cover featuring a picture of Dylan, with whom he famously performed at Live Aid in 1985. Wood handed Dylan his guitar when the latter broke a string on his own during Blowing In The Wind, and carried on by playing air guitar until a roadie brought him a replacement.
“Bob,” he says, “is still one of my favourites because you never know what he’s gonna do next. He’s always a challenge.”
And he’s always touring.
“Oh God, yeah… He’s resigned to living on the road. This little set-up backstage he has wherever he goes in the world – same assistant, same little gang… I think he regards that more as his family now than anything.”
Will he just keep going until he pegs it?
“Yeah. But then again it wouldn’t surprise me if he suddenly said: ‘I’m never touring again.’ He’s one of those unpredictable characters.”
What about you?
“What do ya mean?”
Well, when you’re not touring with the Stones you’re always doing a solo album or tour or something. Are you just going to keep going until you peg it somewhere out there on the road?
“Probably. I’ll never stop creating, that’s for sure. I’m enjoying painting and sculpting now, until the next time I go on the road with the Stones again, which will probably be May.”
Ronnie Wood, in case you didn’t know – and, let’s face it, it’s practically impossible to tell from his walking-scarecrow image, utterly unchanged since the early 70s – will be 60 this year. How does he do it? Why does he do it? I doubt whether even he knows. Nevertheless, that’s what Classic Rock is here to try and find out. He looks befuddled when I explain this. “Erm, you might have to jog my memory a bit…”
Ronald David Wood was born in the west London suburb of Hillingdon on June 1, 1947. The Woods were a musical family. “Everybody played at least one instrument.” Including the family piano, lodged in the doorway to the lounge because it was too big to actually get in the room. Every Friday and Saturday night there would be a party at their small council house. There was so much rocking, his mum said, that when they moved out the house was cracked down the middle. His elder brothers Art and Ted used to practise in a back room. “When I was old enough, they used to let me in there too. It was skiffle, playing washboards, banjos… I started out on trumpet.”
Little Ronnie grew up loving trad jazz. “Then I got into the Stones and Bill Broonzy and that whole rock’n’roll vibe.” The first ‘proper’ band he played in was his brothers’ outfit, The Thunderbirds – shortened to The Birds after they discovered that Chris Farlowe And The Thunderbirds had beaten them to it.
The Birds played mainly covers: American stuff like Chuck Berry, Howlin’ Wolf, Bo Diddley, “lots of old Motown stuff”. By then Ronnie was also studying art at Ealing College, a veritable breeding ground for 60s rock talent – in the canteen he would see Pete Townshend, Ray Davies and Keith Richards. “I knew they all had bands, but they were older than me and I was too shy to talk.”
The Birds did all right, recorded a couple of mid-60s singles for Decca. But when the American Byrds arrived in England in 1965 The Birds’ career was effectively over. Instead, Ronnie joined The Creation, where he claims he beat Jimmy Page to the idea of doing a guitar solo using a violin bow. (Other sources claim it was original Creation guitarist Eddie Phillips)
Ronnie didn’t stick around long enough to argue the toss. He left in 1967 when Jeff Beck – fresh from a chart-hogging stint in The Yardbirds – asked him to join his new group, albeit playing bass. “I didn’t care what I played,” Wood grins now. “Jeff asked if I fancied coming to America with him, that’s all I cared about.” The Jeff Beck Group was also where he worked for the first time with Rod Stewart. With drummer Mickey Waller, the four-piece recorded two albums that have since gone down in rock folklore as landmarks: Truth, in 1968, and the following year Beck-Ola, widely seen as the heavy rock template later finessed by Led Zeppelin and those that followed in their comet trail.
Ronnie hesitates. “I suppose they are seen that way,” he says, “but at the time we saw them more as… patchy; good not great, sort of thing. We were still more sort of blues-oriented. Plus, we didn’t really have any original material. Rod hadn’t really started writing yet, neither had I, not properly, and Jeff never wrote anything, really. I don’t think we could have lasted much longer than we did.”
Equally hamstrung by Beck producer Mickie Most’s insistence on the guitarist churning out a string of more commercially oriented singles – including such cringe-makers as Hi Ho Silver Lining and Love Is Blue, both of which Most refused to allow Stewart to sing – the group’s profound lack of musical vision reached its apotheosis with its decision to split two weeks before they were to have appeared at the history-making Woodstock festival. “We didn’t know it was going to be such a big deal, and we were all fed-up by then anyway.”
Fortunately for Wood, fellow London scene-makers The Small Faces had just suffered from a similar stroke of bad luck with the sudden departure of vocalist/guitarist Steve Marriott to form Humble Pie, just as things were getting interesting musically, which appeared to have holed the ship beneath the waterline. That is, until Ronnie phoned and suggested he come down to see them – and bring his singing mate Rod with him.
It was always Wood’s “game plan”, he says, “to go up a stage” with every group he joined. An ambition he managed to fulfil quite spectacularly with his and Stewart’s inspired teaming with the remaining Small Faces in The Faces (despite the singer having just signed his own separate record deal). Although their recordings were destined to be overshadowed by Rod’s more rounded solo albums of the period – all of which Ronnie played and co-wrote songs on, including such classics as Gasoline Alley (1970), Every Picture Tells A Story (’71, from which came the breakthrough hit Maggie May), and Never A Dull A Moment (’72) – The Faces quickly achieved recognition as one of the most exciting live bands in the world. Indeed, when the figures were totted up they were reckoned to be the second highest grossing band of the early 70s after the Stones.
More fond of partying than of working hard in the studio, The Faces never made one wholly great album – although A Nod’s As Good As A Wink… in 1971 came pretty close – but among the handful they somehow cobbled together amid their legendary drunkenness there were several fine moments: not least their best-known hit, Stay With Me, and also such cherished moments as Had Me A Real Good Time, Cindy Incidentally, Ooh La La and their last single, in ’74, the sublime You Can Make Me Dance (Sing Or Anything), all of which were co-written by Wood.
“People used to say: ‘Oh, Rod keeps all his best songs for his solo albums.’ And yeah, there was all that going on. But he wasn’t secretive about it. He’d say: ‘No, I’m saving this one for my album.’ And everyone would go: ‘Oh, fucking hell!’ He’d go: ‘Sorry, I’m doing that – and Ronnie’s playing on it.’ So I’d have the best of both worlds.”
The key difference between Stewart’s solo albums and the stuff they did together as The Faces, Ronnie says, “was that with Rod you always knew exactly what you were doing, because there was only one boss; in The Faces it was like everybody. We’d spend half the time arguing, then someone would say, ‘Bollocks, let’s go down the pub,’ and that would be it. With Rod, he’d go in the studio with a time-frame, say start at seven, have a break at nine till 10; finish at 11 or midnight. And he would stick to that time frame, ‘Awright, that’s it!’ He’d know what he’d want and in two takes you’d have it. We’d do three songs a night.”
In the Faces “you’d get like one track per album that was really good – or maybe two. But you wouldn’t have that generally high standard throughout. Then again, it was a pretty big thing to ask to keep such a high standard with every song. There were some songs that would just fit into the pocket of album tracks and that was all they’d ever do. But with Rod it was different. Some tracks you thought were album tracks turned out to be best-selling singles.”
It was one such track, Maggie May, that changed their lives for ever when it went to No.1 in Britain and America simultaneously. “It was just another album track – we did it in, like, two takes – but it stuck in my mind after I got home. I woke up singing it the next morning. It wasn’t a surprise to me at all when it became such a big hit.”
Although the band became hugely famous off the back of it, the massive success of Maggie May also sowed the seeds of The Faces’ destruction. Overnight they became known as Rod Stewart And The Faces, which caused a lot of consternation among the group.
Eventually the strain became too much, and Ronnie Lane – a founding member, and an estimable songwriter in his own right – walked out. “I couldn’t believe it,” Wood says. “But Ronnie was kind of going through a strange time in his life anyway. He ran off with his best friend’s wife, then left the band.”
The arrival as replacement of former Free bassist Tetsu Yamauchi – who famously turned up for his audition with a bottle of whiskey in his hand – didn’t really solve the problem. “Tetsu was a little bit of a loose cannon,” Wood says. Which is some statement, considering he would go on to spend the next 30 years working side by side with the ultimate loose cannon, Keith Richards.
Nevertheless, The Faces kept touring for another two years, although they never released another album. “The band fired okay for a bit then it just reached a disinterest, disintegration point,” Wood recalls. The situation was not helped by the fact that by 1975 Stewart had “gone blond”, leaving London behind for a new life in Los Angeles with his equally blonde girlfriend, Hollywood actress Britt Ekland. Wood had also begun a new life, as the replacement for guitarist Mick Taylor in The Rolling Stones.
He says he was “always a Rolling Stone in my head”, right from the first time he saw them play at Richmond Jazz club in 1964. Conversely, it seems the Stones felt the same way, ringing to offer him the job when they needed a replacement for original guitarist Brian Jones in 1969. Wood was rehearsing with The Faces, and Ronnie Lane took the call and turned the offer down for him – something he didn’t actually tell him for five years.
Wood eventually joined the Stones in 1975, hooking up with them in Germany in time for the Black And Blue album. Bill Wyman once said they chose Ronnie over the several others who auditioned (including Eric Clapton and Jeff Beck) primarily because of his down-to-earth sense of humour. Although as Mick Jagger famously pointed out: “Ronnie is just like Brian [Jones]. He can pick up almost any instrument and work something worthwhile out.”
Most of all, of course, it’s Ronnie’s relationship with Keith which has held him in good stead in the Stones. Similar in looks, similar in, er, habits, they’ve always looked as though they share something special. “Yeah, we do,” he says a tad wearily. “But, you know, it’s fucking hard work sometimes.”
Especially lately, he says, now that he’s trying to tour with the band while he’s sober. Until then they had always shared an enclave backstage: Ronnie with his Guinness and drugs, Keith with his whiskey and drugs. Now they have separate rooms.
“Keith has Camp X-Ray backstage and I have the Recovery Room. Mick has the Workout Room and Charlie’s got the Cotton Club. But Camp X-Ray is where it all happens. So I stay out of there as much as possible now, where it used to be Keith and me holding court and matching each other drink for drink, drug for drug. But I realised I’d been there, done it, and can’t keep that up.”
It hasn’t been easy, though, as the bruises on his leg testify. The bruises to his self-esteem are harder to see. At first, anyway, although he says he’s determined to stay strong. “After 40 years solid, to suddenly stop is… yeah, I give myself a pat on the back, cos I really feel good about it. I mean, I’ve been practising for years and not getting it,” he chuckles. “But suddenly the penny dropped. About three months ago, actually. I’ve been doing it [trying to be sober] on and off for many years, but now I know I’ve cracked it.”
Rather like he also did during his time in The Faces, Ronnie found himself acting as go-between in the Stones on more than one occasion, particularly in the mid-80s when Jagger and Richards wouldn’t even pick up the phone to each other.
“Yeah, yeah, that took a lot of… diplomacy. I’d have to get a message through from one to the other very subtly without it looking too obvious, and get an answer back. Then try and get the two of them talking. And more often than not we’d get a lovely happy ending. They’d end up cuddling. ‘Oh, wow, it was a misunderstanding after all. Give me a hug!’”
Another key to Wood’s survival in the Stones, he reckons, is that he’s also maintained his own solo career, begun in 1974 with the still generally wonderful I’ve Got My Own Album To Do. A rag-tag collection of originals and covers featuring numerous friends including Rod, Mick and Keith, it set the template for the half-dozen albums that have followed at fairly regular intervals since.
And of course he has also become known as a painter and sculptor. “That’s probably the thing that really gives me an outlet,” he says, “because art is a solo thing, whereas music, even on my own albums, is always a group effort. I need that personal expression thing, which the art gives me.”
He has also made numerous cameo appearances in films and on TV. His latest acting role is going to be as “uncle Ron the safe cracker” in a future episode of CSI: Miami. He says CSI producer Jerry Bruckheimer has also talked to him about writing music for the soundtrack to the show as well as for some of his forthcoming films, including the next instalment of Pirates Of The Caribbean (in which Johnny Depp has confessed to modelling his Captain Jack persona on Keith Richards). As Ronnie says: “I think it would really suit me.”
What about the Stones, though? Is there gonna be a Bill Wyman moment for him, where he decides he’s finally had enough? “No!” he laughs. “I’m very happy with the way, musically, the Stones are going at the moment. It’s the best we’ve ever been. So I’m very excited about it.”
Originally published in Classic Rock issue 105
